With constant development of mobile technologies, a short messaging service (SMS) has already become a common communications manner of people. FIG. 1 is a schematic diagram of a process of sending a short message in the prior art. As shown in FIG. 1, after a short message application client at a sending end submits a request for sending a short message to a short message center of an operator, the short message center returns a receiving response, and sends a short message to a receiving end; after the receiving end returns a receiving response to the short message center, the short message center sends a receiving status report of the short message to the sending end. Then, the process of sending a short message ends.
It may be known from the above that in the prior art, in settings for sending a short message, only a setting with respect to a short message receiving status report is available; a user at the sending end can know, according to the short message receiving status report, whether the short message has already been sent to the receiving end, but cannot know whether a user at the receiving end has already read the short message, that is, the user at the sending end cannot obtain reading status of the short message at the receiving end. In this case, an accurate and immediate feedback cannot be made for an issue that requires communication of time validity, thereby causing low communication efficiency.